On a show - RAID is SCREWED--HELP!!

[AaronPicot]

On a Red One show right now--Day002. Using my G-RAIDs as my lifelines to stay afloat. Brand new Sonnet RAID that I got the day before Day001 seemed to be working fine when I first formatted/initialized and then when I went to R3D Data Manager to offload to the RAID for the first time--!WHAM!--Grey Screen of Mac-Death. Had to hard kill the computer. Tried switching PCI slots, no good. Tried a RAID0 instead of RAID5, no good. No help from Sonnet, whose employees are enjoying an elongated holiday break (until Jan 4).

If you have suggestions, PLEASE email me directly at:
aaron_picot@yahoo.com
Email only, I will be on set with no internet tomorrow (and for the next 3 weeks). Blackberry will get me emails at least.

Could the enclosure be the problem? A Lemon if you will?

Oh, and I don't think it's the card, since I've been running my G-RAIDs through the eSATA card no problem.

SPECS:
Sonnet Fusion D400QR5 w/ 4-2TB Western Digitals
Tempo SATA E4P Host Adaptor
Mac Pro OS X10.5.8 - 2x2.8Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon - 16BGB RAM

Thanks,
AP

[Roberto Lequeux]

I'd get a new one now and return the other later.

Hope you get it figured out.

[Deanan]

Try dropping down to fewer disks and then formatting. You may have a bad drive.

[James T Mather]

I'd buy a load of off-the-shelf 320gb western digital drives and manually make 2 copies of each. That way you've got genuine redundancy.

[AaronPicot]

Thanks for the suggestions so far guys. Headed to set in an hour. I can survive for another week without the RAID but it will be a scary week. Anyone ever had issues formatting a Sonnet RAID? One suggestions I had was that my enclosure is the problem. Would that cause it to give me the grey-screen-of-death?

[Roberto Lequeux]

(!) Please tell me you are not shooting without backup (!)

[Meryem Ersoz]

Do you know anyone with an LTO-3 or LTO-4 archiving system locally? That would be cheaper and less likely to fail than a bunch of drives.

I have one, and it has been great for backing up feature work. I doubt that I am local to you, but surely there is someone in your area who can do this much more cheaply than purchasing drives.

[Sarah C.]

@Aaron - if it were my gear my guesses in order: hardware or software incompatibility(a quick check.. this really shouldn't be the case), then cable (connectors, ports, then the line itself), then I'd lean toward bad drive aboard or a short or other bad hardware. *Or* how is the power to your gear? (I would have checked that before plugging in one piece of gear) Is it clean and strong? Low power can be a deal-breaker for power-hungry gear. Computers are a little more tolerant than devices. I'm not a DIT, just managed web servers and media/hardware consulting once-upon-a-time. I'm with Mr. Mather.. get simple, get your tooshie covered. Fuss with the RAID when you have time. ~s